National sets sights on Peters

Winston Peters

When Winston Peters got up to speak in Parliament on Thursday, the National Party benches began to bark in unison at him in between taunts of "Poodle! Government poodle!"

Leading the blue pack against the New Zealand First leader and Foreign Minister was Pakuranga MP Maurice Williamson, a role he is expecting to develop more as the year unfolds.

"If he wants to wage war, count me in," he said yesterday.

Mr Peters has clearly got under the skin of the National Party.

Mr Williamson said the barking was a spontaneous response to a week of abuse in the House from Mr Peters towards National and its leader, Don Brash, sometimes very personal.

"There has been no plan to tell them to do it," Mr Williamson said. "There has been this mood sweep through the caucus that there is an absolute poodle sitting there doing the Government's bidding."

Mr Williamson said he was willing to dig up old material he had on Mr Peters from when he was in the Cabinet with him in the 1990s.

He began in the House this week saying that although Mr Peters had said he had never taken a ministerial home, he used to stay at the Plaza Hotel in the early 1990s. And while many people believed he had never had a ministerial car, he had had a Ford Falcon GL station wagon, which Mr Williamson inherited after Mr Peters was sacked from Cabinet.

"I actually don't like that stuff being used in warfare," said Mr Williamson, "but I'm not going to just keep getting battered."

National is bitter that Mr Peters not only accepted a ministerial post after he said he was not interested in "the baubles of office" but that he uses almost every opportunity in Parliament to attack National.

"He is now not only the Government's poodle, but he is their battering ram. It's over the top."

Among Mr Peters' insults to National this week:

* "According to the Chinese calendar I am reliably informed this is the Year of the Dog, but for the National Party in 2006 and for its leader this will be the year of the lame duck."

* "We have this Golden Age card ready for Don, and we are working on it. He will be able to retire soon."

* "Not one Asian leader has said anything to me about immigration policy ... They said, 'Haven't you got in office a leader whose wife comes from Singapore?' and I said, 'I can beat that. Five thousand years ago we [Maori] came from China. The DNA is irrefutable'."

* "You would have to be down here to hear the kinds of insults the people on our right [National] ... purely because they have their noses pressed against the window for the next three years."

On Thursday, Mr Peters also engaged in what appeared to be the first evidence of formal collaboration in question time between Labour and New Zealand First - which is officially outside Government - when Mr Peters set down in advance a question for Prime Minister Helen Clark about National's foreshore and seabed policy.

Mr Peters has previously told Parliament that he has a pile of emails from the National Party and this week said he would drip-feed them.

"I am a farming boy and one thing one does not do: One does not load the barn with hay and feed it to the cattle all in one day; it has to be given out slowly so it can be digested and understood."

He said that among the National Party emails he had were ones from Mr Williamson saying the party had promised all sorts of things to Maori (in the 2002 election) and had got little from it compared with NZ First.

Mr Williamson said he was not worried about any email of his. He had a copy of everything he had ever sent and believed Mr Peters was referring to emails written about the time of his suspension from the caucus following his run-in with former leader Bill English.

"I say to Mr Peters that like the emails he claims are drip-feeding information about the National Party, I have so much more of this stuff in my files and I will drip-feed it at the same rate that he does."

Mr Williamson said he had been around for a lot of the things that went on when Mr Peters was at the Cabinet table, such as when the Wellington Airport deal "went to custard" and ended the National-NZ First coalition, and proposals for overseas trips.

"I know exactly what happened, and I know exactly what some people did."

Mr Peters may be distracted from his attacks on National in the coming week. He has several major events, including a keynote speech on foreign affairs on Tuesday and talks in Wellington on Thursday and Friday with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. 
 

Labour shrugs off threat of pledge card payback

Labour has given no consideration to paying back $446,815 of taxpayer money it spent on its pledge card and on a large pamphlet which is the subject of a police investigation.

"There has been no discussion about that whatsoever," party president Mike Williams said yesterday.

Asked if Labour would consider repaying the money if the police mounted a successful prosecution, Mr Williams said: "You wouldn't consider that until the end of the process."

Like some other parties' election material, the card was paid for from a taxpayer-funded parliamentary account. But only Labour's material has come under the spotlight after a formal complaint during the campaign in September.

The chief electoral office referred the complaint to the police in October, believing an offence had occurred because the card carried no party authorisation.

Labour had been operating on the basis that if the card had the parliamentary crest on it denoting parliamentary funding, it was exempt from classification as a declarable election expense.

A police spokesman said yesterday that the force would not initiate inquiries about other parties' material without a complaint from the chief electoral office, and the electoral office said it would not call in police without a complaint from someone else.

Prime Minister Helen Clark has come under pressure in the House this week over the pledge card.

It is understood Labour is revisiting the issue of the anti-Government literature produced by the Exclusive Brethren during the campaign. The electoral office has already ruled that it should not be classed as a National Party expense.

Police spokesman Jon Neilson confirmed that the police were investigating at least five election-related complaints, believed to include two about Labour's pledge card, one about National overspending its broadcasting allocation through a GST error, one about union advertisements and one about an Exclusive Brethren leaflet attacking Progressive leader Jim Anderton which allegedly carried a false address.